1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device, a system and a method for making commercial transactions.
More in particular, the present invention relates to a device, a system and a method for making commercial transactions through a paper document, which involve scanning an image of a document, e.g. a cheque, reading a magnetic codeline, e.g. a MICR (“Magnetic Ink Character Recognition”) code, and making prints or endorsements on the treated document or cheque.
2. Present State of the Art
Nowadays, payments are increasingly made through electronic transactions. Shops, supermarkets, gas stations, medical consulting rooms, and offices of various kinds have POS terminals that accept credit cards, which allow people to pay for purchased goods and services. Those users who have an “Internet banking” platform available can also make payments, bank transfers and other banking operations through a personal computer (PC), a mobile telephone, a smartphone and other similar user devices.
In addition to the above-mentioned electronic transactions, there are also electronic transactions of a different type which are related to paper documents, such as cheques, luncheon vouchers, invoices and, in general, paper documents of any kind containing information adapted to generate a commercial transaction.
Devices are known, e.g. the “I:Deal” and “wI:Deal” products marketed by the present Applicant, which can automatically read essential information contained in a document, such as, for example, the front and back images and the MICR code of a cheque.
The operation of such devices can be summarized as follows:                a) turning on the device and making it ready to accept commands;        b) possibly changing its default behaviour;        c) indicating to the device that it must get ready to accept documents;        d) providing the device with a document to be scanned;        e) taking data from the document (e.g. image and MICR code);        f) either returning to step d) for another document or ending the procedure.        
These devices require a specific configuration and a physical connection to a computer associated therewith for driving the device and then treating the document data; therefore, they are essentially only used at banks, small companies, professional firms, offices and cash-desks.
Payment systems are also known in the art which involve personal devices which are often owned by the user, such as smartphones, tablets and mobile telephones. However, such payment systems are used for purely electronic commercial transactions, not for commercial transactions involving the use of paper documents, in which case they could with difficulty capture the image, but could not read and decode the MICR codeline that represents one of the very few real security features of a cheque.
Moreover, such devices belonging to a user are of heterogeneous types and support different operating systems and hardware configurations, so that it is unthinkable to create a single software application that embraces all these devices and allows making economical transactions through paper documents.